For Canadians, the summer marks the return of a time-honored tradition – cottage season. It’s a chance for Canadians to flock to the lake country, soak up the sun, have fun on the water, and maybe enjoy a nice cocktail, or a glass of wine. 

Every fall, students return to campus. University towns are inevitably shaped by their student population. Bars, clubs, and other establishments often cater to returning students who may want to share a few cold ones with their friends.

For alcohol brands, these seasonal shifts represent an opportunity to boost sales. However, how do you know exactly what locations, and what customer demographic to prioritize? The answer is simple – geographical analytics. What exactly is geographical analytics and how can you use it to grow your business?

What is Geographical Analytics?

Geographical analytics is a term used to describe location-based data analysis. Other names for it include location analytics, geolocation, or geographic analysis.

In reality, these terms describe the same concept: applying geography to your business processes to gain analytical insights. Geographical analytics contextualizes your data and uncovers insights based on geographic location. It is most commonly used for sales and supply chain data, adding a new dimension to show the flow of items in a particular geographic area.

Benefits of Geographical Analytics

Strengthen marketing campaigns – Ever feel like you’re throwing marketing dollars down the drain? With geographic analytics, you have insight into where your target audience lives and travels, allowing you to determine where to allocate your marketing budget best.

Reliable seasonal demand forecasting – Depending on the season, your product may be in greater demand in a particular area. Think back to our cottage season example. During this period, the influx of vacationers causes the demographics of the region to change. With the help of geographic analytics, you can anticipate this change, and better align your product forecasting with the seasonal demand of the area.

Proactive decision-making – Geographical analytics provides the data to support you in your decision-making process. You can be proactive, and organize your sales efforts in advance around key geographical factors. For instance, you can use geographical analytics to compare university towns in a region. It might enable you to see how the consumption of your value-based vodka varies to see if your current supply matches the demand.

Boost Your Alcohol Brand

Visualizing your data and understanding its relation to any other location is incredibly powerful. Geographical analytics inform decisions about when and where to market and sell your product. Last Call Analytics provides world-leading analytics for the alcohol industry. To learn more, request a demo of Last Call Analytics today!

Building an alcohol brand has never been easy. Whether you are a beverage producer or distributor, today’s retail environment poses significant challenges to your brand. Shifting consumer preferences from beer to hard seltzers, the ever-growing number of suppliers leading to increased competition, and varying government regulations are just some of the challenges facing the industry. How do you navigate these complexities, while trying to build your brand?

To set yourself apart, and not just survive, but thrive in today’s competitive climate, you need to do something different – take advantage of retail analytics. Here we’ll further define retail analytics and provide a brief overview of its benefits.

What is Retail Analytics?

Retail analytics provide detailed reporting of your retail data. It considers various factors such as total sales, inventory, pricing, etc. to discover trends, and allow you to make better business decisions. The insights you derive from retail analytics can help set the stage for improvements in operational efficiency, boost your customer acquisition and retention efforts, and, ultimately, help spur the growth of your brand.

Benefits of Alcohol Retail Analytics

• Target your distribution efforts – Every business wants to sell more. For an alcoholic beverage producer, one of the best ways to do this is to identify stores where your brand is not available that sell high volumes of the category your brand is in. With retail analytics, you can more easily identify the stores that will be a good fit for your brand. For example, if you produce Argentine Malbecs, you can target top selling stores where your Malbec is not being sold.
• Look at underperforming stores and learn why – Distribution is just one piece of the puzzle. You can be listed in all the stores you want, but none of it matters if you are underperforming in those stores. You may have stores that count as a point of distribution but are not achieving their fair share (i.e. performed at average). There are several factors that could contribute to this. Are there stock issues? Maybe your product is not a good fit for that region, or seasonality could be dragging down sales. Analytics allow you to quantify your sales volumes to determine if you did achieve your fair share. For brands with high distribution penetration this becomes more important as your brand is listed but underperforming. Fix the issues using analytics before your brand is delisted. 

• Use trends to inform your marketing and sales efforts – Retail analytics provide actionable insights into your target customer behavior. For example, you can look at how your product performs in urban vs. rural areas, in university towns, or in a vacation destination. You can also look at category segments, price band segments, and seasonality. This will help you further define your target audience and thus inform your marketing and sales strategy.

Boost Your Alcohol Brand

Growing your business in the alcohol industry can be challenging. Using retail analytics can help you make informed decisions about how to navigate the industry’s unique challenges. Last Call Analytics provides world-leading retail data analytics tools for the alcohol industry. To learn more request a demo of Last Call Analytics today!